Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America pptx

Cabeza de Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America [1542] Translated and Annotated by Cyclone Covey Text Copyright (c)1961 by The Crowell-Collier Publishing Company [but not renewed]. Reprinted 1983 by University of New Mexico Press, ISBN 0-8263-0656-X pbk [with an Epilogue by William T. Pilkington Copyright 1983, not reprinted here], Cordially dedicated to Vernon A. Chamberlin Contents Preface [by Translator] Proem The Sailing of the Armada The Governor's Arrival at Xagua with a Pilot Our Landing in Florida Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America 1 Our Penetration of the Country The Governor's Leave-Taking The Entry into Apalachen The Character of the Country Adventures in and out of Apalachen The Ominous Note at Aute Our Departure from Aute The Building of the Barges and Our Departure from the Bay The First Month at Sea after Departing the Bay of Horses Treachery in the Night Ashore The Disappearance of the Greek The Indian Assault and the Arrival at a Great River The Splitting-Up of the Flotilla A Sinking and a Landing What Befell Oviedo with the Indians The Indians' Hospitality before and after a New Calamity News of Other Christians Why We Named the Island "Doom" The Malhado Way of Life How We Became Medicine-Men My Years as a Wandering Merchant The Journey to the Great Bay The Coming of the Indians with Dorantes, Castillo, and Estevánico The Story of What Had Happened to the Others Figueroa's Further Story of What Had Happened to the Others Last Up-Dating on the Fate of the Others Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America 2 The Life of the Mariames and Yguaces The Tribal Split and News of the Remaining Barge Our Escape Our Success with Some of the Afflicted and My Narrow Escape More Cures The Story of the Visitation of Mr. Badthing Our Life among the Avavares and Arbadaos Our Pushing On Customs of that Region Indian Warfare An Enumeration of the Nations and Tongues A Smoke; a Tea; Women and Eunuchs Four Fresh Receptions A Strange New Development Rabbit Hunts and Processions of Thousands My Famous Operation in the Mountain Country The Severe Month's March to the Great River The Cow People The Long Swing-Around The Town of Hearts The Buckle and the Horseshoe Nail The First Confrontation The Falling-Out with Our Countrymen The Parley at Culiacán The Great Transformation Arrival in Mexico City Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America 3 My Voyage Home What Became of the Others Who Went to the Indies Afterword Epilogue [copyrighted, not printed here] Index [not reprinted here] Preface THIS SIXTEENTH-CENTURY odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca's is one of the great true epics of history. It is the semi-official report to the king of Spain by the ranking surviving officer of a royal expedition to conquer Florida which fantastically miscarried. Four out of a land-force of 300 men by wits, stamina and luck found their way back to civilization after eight harrowing years and roughly 6,000 miles over mostly unknown reaches of North America. They were the first Europeans to see and live to report the interior of florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and northernmost Mexico; the 'possum and the buffalo; the Mississippi and the Pecos; pine-nut mash and mesquite-bean flour; and a long string of Indian Stone Age tribes. What these wanderers merely heard and surmised had just as great an effect on subsequent events as what they learned at first hand. Their sojourn "to the sunset," as they told certain of the Indians in the latters' idiom, took on a great added interest and value in the 1930's with the convergent discovery of Carl Sauer and Cleve Hallenbeck that Cabeza de Vaca and his companions had traveled, for the most part, over Indian trails that were still traceable. The thorough work of these two distinguished professors, plus that of innumerable others in such disciplines as archaeology, anthropology, cartography, geology, climatology, botany, zoology and history, has given surprisingly sharp definition to much of the old narrative that had hitherto seemed vague and baffling. The present translation is the first to take advantage of the scientific findings of half a century which culminate in Sauer and Hallenbeck. Hallenbeck, in fact, incorporates and supersedes all previous scholarship on the subject (çlvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: The Journey and Route of the First European to Cross the Continent of North America: Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1940). It was çlvar Núñez's mother, Dona Teresa, whose surname was Cabeza de Vaca, or Head of a Cow. This name originated as a title of honor from the decisive Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in the Sierra Morenas on 12 July 1212, when a peasant named Alhaja detected an unguarded pass and marked it with a cow's skull. A surprise attack over this pass routed the Moorish enemy. King Sancho of Navarre thereupon created the novel title, Head of a Cow, and bestowed it in gratitude upon the peasant Alhaja. çlvar Núñez proudly adopted this surname of his mother's, though that of his father, de Vera, had a lustre from recent imperialism. Pedro de Vera, the sadistic conqueror of the Canaries, was çlvar Núñez's grandfather. çlvar Núñez, the eldest of his parents' four children, spoke proudly of his paternal grandfather. It may have been significant for the boy's later career in America that he listened to old Pedro repeat his tales of heroism, and that he had a childhood familiarity with the conquered Guanche savages with whom the grandfather staffed his household as slaves. çlvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who was born about 1490, grew up in the little Andalusian wine center of Jérez, just a few miles from Cádiz and fewer still from the port San Lúcar de Barrameda at the mouth of the Guadalquivir. This is the port Magellan sailed from in September 1519 and Cabeza de Vaca, seven years and ten months later. Cabeza de Vaca was about ten years old when Columbus, aged forty-nine, returned to Cádiz in chains. The boy may well have seen the autocratic admiral thus just as he himself was to be returned to the Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America 4 same city in chains at the age of fifty-three. In the tradition of the landed gentry, Cabeza de Vaca turned to a military career while still in his teens. When about twenty-one, he marched in the army which King Ferdinand sent to aid Pope Julius II in 1511, and saw action in the Battle of Ravenna of 11 April 1512 in which 20,000 died. He served as ensign at Gaeta outside Naples before returning to Spain and to the service of the Duke of Medina Sidonia in 1513 in Seville, the metropolis of his home region. In the Duke's service, Cabeza de Vaca survived the Comuneros civil war (including the recapture of the Alcázar, 16 September 1520, from the Sevillian rebels), the battles of Tordesillas and Villalar, and finally, warfare against the French in Navarre. He was a veteran of sufficient distinction by 1527 to receive the royal appointment of second in command in the Narváez expedition for the conquest of Florida, a territory which at that time was conceived as extending indefinitely westward. This appointment saved him from another Italian campaign; Charles V's Spanish and German troops ingloriously sacked Rome itself barely a month before the Narváez expedition sailed. Cabeza de Vaca married, apparently, only a short time before the sailing, though there is a bare possibility that he postponed marriage to his return. The red-bearded, one-eyed chief commander, or governor, Pamfilo de Narváez, was a grasping bungler. He lost an eye when he took an expedition from Cuba to Mexico in jealousy to arrest Cortes. Cortes first won over most of his 900 troops and then roundly defeated the rest. Narváez was arrested wounded. As governor of Cuba, he had calmly sat on a horse one day and watched his men massacre 2,500 Indians who were distributing food to the Spaniards. It was his stupid decision to separate his cavalry and infantry from their sustaining ships that sealed the doom of his expedition in Florida as Cabeza de Vaca forewarned in vain. One of the interesting undercurrents of Cabeza de Vaca's narrative, which refrains from critical remarks about the Governor, is the implicit antagonism between them. Narváez deliberately sent Cabeza de Vaca on dirty-work reconnaissances, sent him into a possibly hostile village first, put him in charge of the more dangerous vanguard while he brought up the rear, and tried to get rid of him by assigning him to the ships. The climax of their rivalry came when Cabeza de Vaca dramatized his correctness in asking the Governor for orders while the Governor was running out on the majority of his expeditionaries. The modem reader may at first find himself carried along by his interest in the expeditionaries' struggle for survival, but in time will likely grow increasingly interested in the struggle for survival of the aborigines. Cabeza de Vaca's ability to survive depended in large measure on his capacity to adjust to them and identify with them. His induplicable anthropological information on the paleolithic and neolithic cultures of coast, forest, river, plains, mountain, and desert tribes presents hitherto untapped "news of the human race" on a considerable scale. Anthropologists and psychologists can make much of such data as, for instance, the prevalence of illnesses due to hysteria. The reactions of the retreating expeditionaries to a variety of extreme tests constitute an important section of the "news of the human race" in this little book. One of their first tests, though not so mortal a one, was the blandishments of Santo Domingo. Another of the preliminary tests a kind of harbinger of the tragedies to come was the hurricane that caught the expedition in Cuba. And among the many firsts of Cabeza de Vaca's narrative, this is the first description in literature of a West Indies hurricane. Cabeza de Vaca gives an unvarnished, soldierly account of what he went through in the years 1527-37 which leaves much to be inferred and much is inferrable. He passes up most of his opportunities to dwell on morbidity or his own heroism, fiercely jealous though he is of his honor and tantalizing as is the possibility, to him, of his having received divine favor. He remains the central figure and guiding spirit throughout the epic, even if omitting to mention this role most of the time. It was his resilience and resourcefulness and, above all, venturousness which gave momentum to the survivors' sojourn. The others who got back with him had, in one stretch of years, come to a paralyzed impasse which could not be broken until he joined them. He had been actively working himself out of servitude as a far-wandering merchant during these same years. He would Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America 5 attempt cures and operations that others would quail from. Even toward the end, at the climax, he could not induce his fellow Spaniards to rush on ahead, but went himself. He must have had a penchant for austerity. In time, all four survivors were thriving on it walking all day and eating only one meal, a spare one at evening, and feeling no weariness. Even the Indians were amazed. One suspects that his companions had less zest for this life and harbored some resentment at being thus driven. They had twice given him up for dead and gone on without verification. The Indians found Castillo the most attractive most of the time; and it becomes an interesting puzzle to try to ascertain why, from the limited evidence given. Captain Castillo was a well-bred hidalgo from the university town of Salamanca, the son of a distinguished and learned father. He was the least bold of the four survivors and the one who slipped most quickly and quietly into obscurity when the trek was over. He is the one who taught the other four the art of faith-healing; yet he felt the most inhibitions in exercising the art because of a sense of unworthiness. Maybe Castillo was really the one responsible for deepening Cabeza de Vaca's mechanical religiousness to genuine devoutness. Cabeza de Vaca, in any event, learned a lot. Both Castillo and Dorantes, we see early in the narrative in Florida, had a certain rapport with Cabeza de Vaca; and Dorantes intended to continue in association with him after the journey's end in Mexico City. The Pimas in northern Sonora presented Dorantes with the more than 600 opened deer hearts, and desert Indians in New Mexico had given him a precious copper rattle. He seems gradually to have displaced Castillo as the Indian favorite; but it is Cabeza de Vaca who emerges clearly dominant at the last. When he returned to Spain in 1537, ten hard years older and wiser, his consuming ambition was to go back to the region in which he had so frequently faced death, as first in command. A half-year's delay in getting home to Spain, occasioned by the capsizing of his intended ship at Veracruz, may have been the factor which gave the leadership to De Soto instead. De Soto did all he could to engage Cabeza de Vaca as his second in command, but after Cabeza de Vaca's experience under the incompetent Narváez, he could not consent to seconding any commander again. One reason he wished to go back to "Florida" was his belief in the land's possibilities for agriculture, grazing, and mining especially for gold, silver, emeralds, and turquoises. He also had become convinced that a fabulous aboriginal nation existed in the north, not far beyond the perimeter of his recent circuit, and another on the Pacific, which he believed much nearer the northern pueblos than was remotely possible. The evidence he gives of these opulent places quickly convinced many others. They, in fact, leaped to connect the unseen pueblos across the desert with the legendary Seven Cities of Cíbola, which supposedly had been founded somewhere in the west in the eighth century by seven fugitive bishops. The evidence he withheld was equally convincing. Not forgetting that he had gone out on a military expedition responsible to the Crown, he felt he should not divulge much of his new knowledge before he had first reported to the king. He also did not wish anyone else to get the jump on him in picking the "Florida" plum; so he hated to divulge what might entice others to apply to the king or what would help ensure their success. He and Dorantes hoped to return to the north together. Their very reticence fired imaginations and greed and became in itself a kind of proof of marvels. The fact that Cabeza de Vaca inadvertently left his six "emerald" arrowheads behind on the Sinaloa and could not produce the mere malachite specimens for examination gave his guarded testimony about emeralds and other precious minerals uncontradictable authority. He, of course, believed them genuine; the turquoises he had been given actually were. When Cabeza de Vaca sincerely represented the possible riches of the unexplored country to the north in glowing terms to the viceroy (for the viceroy was the personal representative of the king), Mendoza promptly set about acting on the intelligence. Both the Fray Marcos and Coronado expeditions materialized from the direct stimulus of Cabeza de Vaca's return and reports. He repeated his confidence in the new region to Charles V in person, as well as in his full, printed report which he shared with the public in October 1542. (The viceroy had earlier transmitted a report to the king which has not survived.) At the time of De Soto's preparations, when Cabeza de Vaca's hopes of leading a Florida expedition had long since collapsed, he still Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America 6 kept his pact with Dorantes and would not even brief his kinsmen who had accepted commands with De Soto. But he did confidentially advise them by all means to sell their estates and go. In the long run, he far underestimated the potential of this new region, but a terrible disillusionment with it inevitably set in after a few more expeditions went through the sort of suffering the Narváez "conquerors" had experienced. There was a more compelling reason than riches for Cabeza de Vaca's sanguine view: He had learned to love the land as beautiful and the Indians as surpassingly handsome, strong, and intelligent. In the midst of his sufferings, he caught a vision of the brotherhood of man. He wanted to bring the Indians civilization and Christianity and to establish a humane order among them. He had found that he could cure their sicknesses, communicate Christian teachings, and compose their tribal hostilities, leaving the lands he passed through in peace. The immediate result of his return still 900 miles before he reached Mexico City was to stop the slave raids in Sonora and Sinaloa and induce the terrified refugee population to return and rebuild their villages and cultivate the soil once more. In his strongest language, he urged an unrapacious, peaceful winning of the Indians to king and Christ. He went so far as to say that this was the only sure way to "conquer" them. The great irony of his impressive demonstration is the scale of the brutality with which the lesson was violated. His devotion to the dual and somewhat contradictory codes of the knight and the Christian gentleman made Cabeza de Vaca appear at times quixotic to his contemporaries (nearly a century before the dear old Don); yet it was the crass, "practical" men who failed and who contributed to the failure of many others. Cabeza de Vaca succeeded, and saved three others. He would have saved many more possibly the entire expedition had more of the men matched his own valor and responsibleness, particularly the chief commander, Narváez, who at the last thought only of his own survival, and did not survive. Since De Soto had already received the royal commission for Florida (by the time Cabeza de Vaca got back to Spain), the king came through with the alternative appointment of adelantado (governor) of the considerable South American provinces of the Río de la Plata, to which Cabeza de Vaca sailed in 1540. His first concern on assuming office was to rescue the Indian-beleaguered and disease-wasting colony of Asunción. Instead of the year-long sea route via Buenos Aires, he chose to lead an expedition directly overland 1000 miles across unknown and supposedly impenetrable jungles, mountains, and cannibal villages. He accomplished this successfully, barefoot, from late November 1541 to late March 1542, from Santa Catalina Island via Iguazú Falls. The following summer he led an even more remarkable expedition about the same distance up the Paraguay in search of the legendary Golden City of Manoa. Extreme privation, particularly during the tropical rains of the fall, forced him to turn back when his men would go no further. Back at Asunción, he fell victim to intrigue and fever. He had systematically prohibited enslaving, raping, and looting of the Indians which were what the majority of the Spaniards had come for. So they deposed him. It is a more complicated story than that, however. The soldiers resented his dealing gently and as a divine agent. (He required them to transport a fine camp bed for himself through the jungles.) They returned him wretchedly to Spain in chains in 1543. Not until 1551 did the Council for the Indies get round to trying him, and then they gave credence to the unscrupulous lieutenant governor who had led the mutiny in La Plata, and sentenced Cabeza de Vaca to banishment to Africa for eight years. His wife loyally spent all her fortune in his behalf and, finally, the king awoke from his habitual stupor, annulled the sentence, awarded Cabeza de Vaca a pension, and placed him on the Audiencia. He died in honor in 1557. His account of his South American adventures, which is three times longer than that of his North American journey, was bound with the second edition of the latter in 1555 under the title Comentarios. Note on the Text The title of the North American narrative was La Relación (The Relation) . The second edition had a running Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America 7 title, Naufragios (Shipwrecks), which is misleading. There are minor differences in the two editions, and they are noted in the following translation wherever important. The 1542 edition, published at Zamora, has no chapter titles, only periodic breaks in the text. An editor added titles for the 1555 edition, published at Valladolid. They are sometimes inconsistent in style and often miss the crux of the short chapters' content. The chapter divisions, furthermore, sometimes ignore the natural breaks in the narrative. In the following translation, the chapter divisions and titles have occasionally been altered to fit the text better. The paragraphing is also the translator's, on the same principle. (Sixteenth-century books paragraphed infrequently.) Several passages have been transposed from their original out-of-place locations in the text; all of these transpositions are identified, and the reason for them should appear plain. Interpolated material is given in brackets, which are used in lieu of footnotes to speed and simplify the reading. Clarifying information is kept at a minimum to maintain the continuous flow of the narrative. Besides the original 1542 edition and the original 1555 edition of the Relación, there is also the valuable, and earlier, supplement known as the Joint Report. It is a thirty-page summary of the sojourn drawn up by Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, and Dorantes in Mexico City in 1536 and delivered to the Audiencia at Santo Domingo by Cabeza de Vaca on his homeward voyage. Its difference in style from the Relación suggests Castillo as the penman for his superior education. The original of this document is not known to be in existence. The earliest known version of it from a 1539 copy appears in volume III, book 35, of Captain Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés: Historia General y Natural de las Indias, Islas y Tierra-Firme del Mar Océano, edited by D. José Amador de los Ríos (Madrid 1853). All three of these primary sources have been collated in the following translation. The Relación was translated into Italian in 1556, and this Italian version was the source of the first English version, a paraphrase which appeared in Purchas His Pilgrimes in 1613. Spanish reprints came out in 1736, 1749, 1852, and 1906, not counting an 1870 abridgement. A French translation appeared in 1837. Only two full translations have appeared in English: that of Buckingham Smith in 1851 (a revision of which was published posthumously, having been edited by John Gilmary Shea in 1871, and reprinted in Scribner's Original Narratives of Early American History series in 1907, edited by Frederick W. Hodge of the Bureau of American Ethnology), and the 1904 translation of Fanny Bandelier, published in 1905, edited by Adolph Bandelier. The translation that follows has been checked against both of these and is deeply indebted to the more literal Smith version. Translated and paraphrased portions of the Relación by Sauer and Hellenbeck; the text in the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, XXII (1946); and the abridged Spanish text of José E. Espinosa and E. A. Mercado of 1941, also have proved useful. Morris Bishop, The Odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca (Century, 1933), documents the explorer's early life. Cabeza de Vaca's dates are Old Style. To correlate them to our present calendar, add ten days. The change of New Year's from March 25 to January 1 has, however, already been made in the translation. Cabeza de Vaca' s league seems to be the 3.1-mile Spanish league of his time rather than the 2.6-mile, though he may use the latter occasionally. Even his sea distances seem to be in terms of the 3.1-mile league instead of the longer nautical league. In any case, the distances are estimates. They are often amazingly accurate, but starvation, deathly weariness, and oppressive fright more often interfered with mensural judgment. The estimates therefore usually err on the side of exaggeration, though by any reckoning at any time the distances traversed are vast. The translator-editor herewith acknowledges and thanks the New York Public Library for furnishing him with a microfilm of the 1542 edition of the Relación and another of the 1555 edition of the Relación and Comentarios, and the Library of Congress for a microfilm of the Joint Report from Oviedo's Historia; also Mary Jaime and Esta Albright of the Interlibrary Loan and Special Services Departments of the Oklahoma State University Library; and Marvin T. Edmison and the OSU Research Foundation; and Richard P. Cecil, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America 8 the commissioning editor-in-chief. C.C. Wake Forest University Sacred Caesarian Catholic Majesty: AMONG ALL THE PRINCES who have reigned, I know of none who has enjoyed the universal esteem of Your Majesty [Emperor Charles V] at this day, when strangers vie in approbation with those motivated by religion and loyalty. Although everyone wants what advantage may be gained from ambition and action, we see everywhere great inequalities of fortune, brought about not by conduct but by accident, and not through anybody's fault but as the will of God. Thus the deeds of one far exceed his expectation, while another can show no higher proof of purpose than his fruitless effort, and even the effort may go unnoticed. I can say for myself that I undertook the march abroad, on royal authorization, with a firm trust that my service would be as evident and distinguished as my ancestors', and that I would not need to speak to be counted among those Your Majesty honors for diligence and fidelity in affairs of state. But my counsel and constancy availed nothing toward those objectives we set out to gain, in your interests, for our sins. In fact, no other of the many armed expeditions into those parts has found itself in such dire straits as ours, or come to so futile and fatal a conclusion. My only remaining duty is to transmit what I saw and heard in the nine years I wandered lost and miserable over many remote lands. I hope in some measure to convey to Your Majesty not merely a report of positions and distances, flora and fauna, but of the customs of the numerous, barbarous people I talked with and dwelt among, as well as any other matters I could hear of or observe. My hope of going out from among those nations was always small; nevertheless, I made a point of remembering all the particulars, so that should God our Lord eventually please to bring me where I am now, I might testify to my exertion in the royal behalf. Since this narrative, in my opinion, is of no trivial value for those who go in your name to subdue those countries and bring them to a knowledge of the true faith and true Lord and bring them under the imperial dominion, I have written very exactly. Novel or, for some persons, difficult to believe though the things narrated may be, I assure you they can be accepted without hesitation as strictly factual. Better than to exaggerate, I have minimized all things; it is enough to say that the relation is offered Your Majesty for truth. I beg that it may be received as homage, since it is the most one could bring who returned thence naked. Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America 9 CHAPTER 1 : The Sailing of the Armada ON 17 JUNE 1527, Governor Pámfilo de Narváez left the port of San Lúcar de Barrameda authorized and commanded by Your Majesty to conquer and govern the provinces which should be encountered from the River of Palms [the Río Grande] to the cape of Florida. His expedition consisted of five ships with about 600 men and the following officers (for they will have to be mentioned): Cabeza de Vaca, Treasurer and alguacil mayor [provost marshall]; Alonso Enriquez, Comptroller; Alonso de Solfs, Quartermaster to Your Majesty and Inspector; Juan Suárez, a Franciscan friar, Commissary; and four more Franciscan friars. We arrived at the island of Santo Domingo [about September 17] and there tarried nearly 45 days gathering provisions and particularly horses, during which time the local inhabitants, by promises and proposals, seduced more than 140 of our men to desert. From that island we sailed to Santiago [de Cuba] where, for some days, the Governor recruited men and further furnished himself with arms and horses. lt fell out there that a prominent gentleman, Vasco Porcallo, of Trinidad, a hundred leagues northwest on the same island, offered the Governor some provisions he had stored at home if the Governor could go pick them up. The Governor forthwith headed with the whole fleet to get them, but, on reaching Cabo de Santa Cruz, a port half way, he decided to send Captain [Juan] Pantoja [who had commanded the crossbowmen on Narváez's 1520 expedition to Mexico] to bring the stores back in his ship. For greater security, the Governor sent me along with another ship, while he himself anchored with the remaining four (he had bought an additional ship at Santo Domingo). When we reached the port of Trinidad, Vasco Porcallo conducted Captain Pantoja to the town, a league away, while I stayed at sea with the pilots, who said we ought to get out of there as fast as possible, for it was a very bad port where many vessels had been lost. Since what happened to us there was phenomenal, I think it will not be foreign to the purpose of my narrative to relate it here. The next morning gave signs of bad weather. Rain started falling and the sea rose so high that I gave the men permission to go ashore; but many of them came back aboard to get out of the wet and cold, unwilling to trek the league into town. A canoe, meanwhile, brought me a letter from a resident of the town requesting me to come for the needed provisions that were there. I excused myself, saying I could not leave the ships. At noon the canoe returned with a more urgent letter, and a horse was brought to the beach for me. I gave the same answer as before, but the pilots and people aboard entreated me to go in order to hasten the provisions as fast as possible; they greatly feared the loss of both ships by further delay in this port. So I went to the town, first leaving orders with the pilots that should the south wind (which is the one which often wrecks vessels here) whip up dangerously, they should beach the ships at some place where the men and horses could be saved. I wanted to take some of the men with me for company, but they said the weather was too nasty and the town too far off; but tomorrow, which would be Sunday, they intended to come, with God's help, and hear Mass. An hour after I left, the sea began to rise ominously and the north wind blow so violently that the two boats would not have dared come near land even if the head wind had not already made landing impossible. All hands labored severely under a heavy fall of water that entire day and until dark on Sunday. By then the rain and tempest had stepped up until there was as much agitation in the town as at sea. All the houses and churches went down. We had to walk seven or eight together, locking arms, to keep from being blown away. Walking in the woods gave us as much fear as the tumbling houses, for the trees were falling, too, and could have killed us. We wandered all night in this raging tempest without finding any place we could linger as long as half an hour in safety. Particularly from midnight on, we heard a great roaring and the sound of many voices, of little bells, also flutes, tambourines, and other instruments, most of which lasted till morning, when CHAPTER 1 10 [...]... about the country to the south, they said that nine days in that direction lay the village of Aute, where the people their friends had plenty of corn, beans, and melons also fish, being near the sea Taking everything into consideration the poverty of the land and unfavorable reports of the people, etc.; the constant guerilla tactics of the Indians, wounding our people and horses with impunity from the. .. February the islanders go into other parts to seek sustenance, for then the root is beginning to grow and is not edible These people love their offspring more than any in the world and treat them very mildly If a son dies, the whole village joins the parents and kindred in weeping The parents set off the wails each day before dawn, again at noon, and at sunset, for one year The funeral rites occur when the. .. gave them more The Governor also presented the cacique some trinkets In the middle of the night, the Indians fell on us without warning not only the Governor's party in the cacique's lodge, but also our sick men strewn on the beach [The Joint Report says three men were killed] The Governor got hit in the face with a rock Some of us grabbed the cacique, but a group of Indians retrieved him, leaving us... passing from one side to the other full of many-plumed Indians On this intelligence, we next day resumed our dogged quest of Apalachen, using the captive Indians as guides Thus we went until June 17 without seeing a native who would let us catch up to him Then on this 17th, there appeared in front of us a chief in a painted deerskin riding the back of another Indian, musicians playing reed flutes walking... village on the opposite side of the lake attacked us in the same way, escaping the same way, again losing a single man We stayed 25 days [26, according to the Joint Report] in Apalachen, during which time we made three reconnaissances, finding the country sparsely populated and hard to get through because of swamps, woods, and lakes The cacique, as well as the other Indians we had been holding, confirmed... a finger in diameter Their women toil incessantly From October to the end of February every year, which is the season these Indians live on the island, they subsist on the roots I have mentioned, which the women get from under water in November and December Only in these two months, too, do they take fish in their cane weirs When the fish is consumed, the roots furnish the one staple At the end of. .. the other officers and that I had no authority to make these requirements of him He then bade the Notary, instead, to certify that he was breaking up the settlement he had founded, because the country lacked means of support, and was going in search of the port [Pánuco] and a better land Thereupon he ordered the mustering and victualing of the men who were to go with him Then he turned to me and, in. .. holding his robe of civet-marten skins (These are the finest skins in the world, I believe Their fragrance seems like amber and musk and can be smelled a long way off We saw other robes there, but none to match this one.) Those of us in the vicinniity where the Governor got hurt managed to put him in his barge and to hasten all but fifty of our force aboard theirs The fifty stood guard high up on the. .. along a Negro, and the Indians left two of their number as hostages lt was night when the Indians returned, without water in the containers and without the Christians When these returning lndians spoke to our two hostages, the latter started to dive into the water; but some of our soldiers held them back in the barge The canoe sped away, leaving us very confused and dejected over the loss of our comrades... later learned from Indians in this vicinity of the arrival of the barges in need of water, and of the two men who had remained behind The Indians produced a dagger that had belonged to Teodoro One suspects that Teodoro insisted on accompanying the canoemen for water because he thought it his best hope to survive; i.e he had no intention of returning to the barges He and his servant may, in fact, have lived . Happened to the Others Last Up-Dating on the Fate of the Others Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America 2 The Life of the Mariames and Yguaces The Tribal. Florida Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America 1 Our Penetration of the Country The Governor's Leave-Taking The Entry into Apalachen The Character of the